L’Avventura

March 25, 2009

I wanted to start off anything by talking about a movie I watched about 2 weeks ago, a 1960 Italian movie L’Avventura. I was entirely blown away by it. As someone told me before I ever saw it, “It is one of those long movies you sort of suffer through until the end when you realize it is genius.”
It’s unbelievably true. At nearly 2 1/2 hours, L’Avventura is longer than my timespan, but at the end I was completely blown away. It’s not only genius, it’s completely beautiful.
L’Avventura, which means “the adventure” in Italian is the story of Claudia on a search for her missing friend, Anna, who goes missing on a boating trip with some friends. As a group they begin a search for her but eventually it feels as though the only person looking for her is Claudia…but not because she misses her friend. Claudia ends up falling in love with Anna’s boyfriend, Sandro. Overall, it’s really not about the plot but about the character development that occurs.
If you enjoy dialogue, then this movie is probably not for you, as shown in the above video. It feels as though more than anything it’s the cinematography that speaks. The black and white film is absolutely perfect, making the scenery awe-inspiring. You may be a robot if you do not at one point want to go on a boat trip in the Mediterranean because of this movie.
Like I was told, it does seem like kind of a drag, mainly because it almost feels like a silent movie. But once it was over, all I could think about was how absolutely brilliant it was, which is also open to interpretation. To me, it drew on the point that sometimes we are all alone, and nobody can fix it. There are always going to be those moments where we fail to communicate with others, whether it’s a misunderstanding or an inability to explain. It’s impossible to avoid conflict with others, even those you love to death. But even beyond that, life is still a beautiful thing around us, from the scenery of a small island to overlooking a town from a belltower.
I highly recommend this movie. It’s in Italian, but like I said, the characters keep quiet so reading subtitles is never that much of a drag. (Sometimes they make me sleepy.) I have no idea how easily it could be obtained outside Netflix, considering the DVD is surprisingly $30 on Amazon.com. But this movie is definitely the reason that Netflix always tells me I seem to have a preference for “1960s Foreign Dramas,” and I do not have a problem with that at all.